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Chapter 9: Wrapping Everything Up!

“What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.”

Henry David Thoreau



You are just about finished with the TDG concept. Before I lay down my last three commentaries, I would just like to thank you for staying with this website to this point. I certainly appreciate your patience and open mindedness. If you have come this far to read this paragraph, you have given me great honor.






Changing the Individual

In Chapter 2, I mentioned several popular suggested improvements to the western democratic model. Because none of these improvements could transcend the 12 limitations, they were not effective improvements. There is one more popular improvement I want to mention: changing our own character is what is necessary to effect positive changes in western democracy.

Over the years, I have encountered many thinkers who believe the world will be a better place only if we first change our personal value systems for the positive. Such a change will diffuse into the political process, and western democracy will get better because we will have better voters who are putting better people into influential positions. This then leads to better governance. The western democratic model need not be changed at all; enough of us need only change ourselves—and the changes at the top levels of government will follow.

I could have dealt with this particular popular improvement in Chapter 2, but I have brought it into these final sections of the book for a deeper reason. To explain this further, I will bring in some philosophy of aboriginal thinkers.

Their paradigm has divided a person's psyche into four parts: the individual, the family, the community, and the nation. All four parts affect each other. If one part is strong, it strengthens the other three. If one is weak, it weakens the others. We know that people who are raised in dysfunctional families and neighborhoods tend to have more dysfunctional values than people who are raised in better nurturing environments. People raised in western democracies tend to have more opportunities and prosperity than people under other systems of government. And these western citizens are then more able to rise to their full potential. This increase in potential eventually affects how well the society is governed.

The diagram below shows how the four parts are connected. Sometimes these connections are direct and easy to see. And sometimes they are indirect and may take a decade or two to see some tangible relationships.


In general, a majority of citizens living in western democracies perceive western democracy to be more of a civilized power struggle rather than a positive social engineering tool. This perception breeds the distrust, the cynicism, apathy, and the feelings of powerlessness that western democracy obviously inculcates into its citizenry. These attitudes, even though western democracy is indeed a very powerful social engineering tool, mean that the “nation” of our aboriginal paradigm is not healthy: it has minimal influence to create better communities, families, and individuals. We could argue for a long time on the magnitude of this negative influence, but I think most readers would agree that the “nation” could be—and should be—providing better leadership.

If anything, the “nation” of western democracy has become the weakest link in the aboriginal paradigm—and is limiting how much further we can advance as a civilization. The 12 limitations of western democracy are creating this barrier.

Reforming our characters for the better is indeed a noble and worthwhile task. Life goes so much better for those individuals who successfully travel on this life journey. But even if many individuals take this journey, none of the 12 limitations of western democracy go away. Reforming characters seems a pointless task in terms of strengthening the “nation” for far too many people are not encouraged to take their life journey when the nation seems to be run by people who also need to go on that journey. If anything, the weaker rulers and the weaker subjects reinforce each other not to make their own life changes. When individuals remain weak (because that seems to be the example,) too many families and communities also remain weak. And this then feeds back into weakening the nation.

The TDG is about strengthening the nation. By being free of the 12 limitations, a “nation” under a TDG will find people of good character and capacity for governance—and put them in a forum where they can fully utilize their talents and experience. This will produce better governance for the society, which then inspires communities, families, and individuals to new heights. And these new heights, a decade or two later, will cycle back up to raise the nation even higher.

The four parts of the aboriginal paradigm are always connected. If there is not a simultaneous effort to raise the nation at the same time as the individual, family, and community, then any rise in the individual, family, and community will be limited!






The Author's Credentials (or Lack thereof)

Writing the TDG started in 1997. The first version was a book self-published in 2000 that did not go anywhere. The second 2004 version was a more scholarly attempt to get some recognition from the academic world. But the response was rather negative. One reviewer stated that I obviously did not understand democracy very well to write about this subject.

There is a lot of truth to this statement. Other than whatever I have picked up over the years from the mass media and a few books, I have no formal training in political science, sociology, constitutional law, journalism, or other professions that are often called on to explain the various aspects of western democracy. Plus my personal experience of being in lower-level management of a political party (which led to me becoming disenchanted and withdrawing my involvement in party politics) is really no official qualification to be regarded as an expert.

To counter my lack of credibility, I should point out that the academic fields of political science and sociology are only a bit more than a century old. The founders of past political movements such as those that brought about the Magna Carta and American Constitution certainly had no such expertise to guide them. The various activists of voter suffrage probably had little understanding of how the reforms they were advocating would affect society several decades later. Their main motivation was that giving the vote to all economic classes, all races, and both genders was the right thing to do.

If anything, the experts of today are holding us back. With all those decades of studying how western democracy works, the experts seem to have concluded that because we (or should I say “a few of the elite”?) now understand the intricate forces within western democracy, we (or should I say “they”?) can make it work better. Therefore radical changes—like the TDG—are not necessary. In fact, because we don't fully understand a futuristic TDG as well as we understand today's western democratic model, we should stay with the known ways of governance. But despite all the experts' assurances that western democracy will improve in time, the 12 limitations are there—and will always be there—if we continue listening to the acknowledged experts.

The TDG is going to be a whole new dynamic of societal decision-making. I will admit that we don't understand it fully—mostly because it needs to evolve to be fully realized. But the beauty of this evolution is that it is of no immediate tangible societal consequence as the TDG is being built. There is little risk in starting local TDGs and seeing where these early builders can take it!

As the early and middle TDGs get some cohesiveness and are operating under the principles of this book, the academic world will want to study it, and with this study will come new ways of making it work even better.

The future of what happens with the TDG will depend neither on my rather amateurish presentation nor on the sophisticated academic analyses for or against this idea. The TDG will move forward mostly on the same basis as other great social movements have moved forward in the past: making the change was the right thing to do—and people were willing to sacrifice to do it.

So I shall leave you, the reader, now with this one challenge:

“Is not working for the change from western democracy to Tiered Democratic Governance the right thing to do in the 21st century?”

Dave Volek
January, 2010


Taylor Ruecker on Unsplash
For a more comfortable read, an ebook version of TDG is available on Kindle and on Kobo for about $7.